Geek Club

Africa Teen Geeks offer computer science education to school children throughout the academic year. Clubs are taught by our volunteers who are trained and supported by ATG Microsoft. Geek Clubs represent a scalable approach to computer science education and includes forty curriculum hours paired with project based, group learning.

We partner with Middle Schools, High Schools and Universities to bring Geek Clubs to communities across the country. Any primary, High School or University Faculty member is eligible to start a Club at their school or university.

OUR CURRICULUM

Monthly, project based activities
Opportunity to build real world software including mobile apps and games
40 hours of instruction per school year
An end of year, student-choice, final project that impacts your community.
*Any learner under the age of 13 interested in starting a Club must have a parent apply on her behalf

For the past three years Africa Teen Geeks in partnership with the SABC Foundation, and UNISA hosts 12000 children from disadvantaged schools to learn to code at all UNISA regional labs nationally.

Festival of Code

Free 1 week geek camp where 100 of top performing children from all Africa Teen Geeks programme where the learners learn computer science, such as art, storytelling, robotics, video games, web sites, and apps. they also hear from guest speakers, participate in workshops, connect with engineers and entrepreneurs, and go on field trips. The program culminates in a final project where the children build their own product and present it to their class and judges.

See Gallery here.

Girl Geek

Standard Bank, in partnership with African Teen Geeks, started on a journey with an initiative known as Girl Geek in August 2016. The initiative was launched around National Women’s Day as a long-term investment into the support and growth of young females from the public schooling system into the world of Computer Science .

The one-year learnership programme has come to a successful end for the previous group. The next intake of 33 young females partaking in the learnership programme with Standard Bank will commence on 8th August 2017. But the journey for the first group does not end here. Those who have invested the effort and energy will be assessed and the top 10 will have two more years of mentorship and leadership.

Knit2Code Only 5% of South African public schools have computer labs. South Africa is not unique, in fact according to the ITU only 38% of the global population own a computer. This means the majority of poor people are excluded from learning computer science due to lack of access to computers and the internet. Africa Teen Geeks is working to address this challenge by ensuring that every child irrespective of economic background or zip code has an opportunity to learn how to code. We are doing this by introducing Knit2Code. Knit2Code teaches young girls aged 6-18 coding through knitting. The similarities between a knitting pattern and a computer program are stunning. Knitting uses the same type of loops, conditions and concepts of functions as a computer language. “Knits” and “purls” are essentially the 0s and 1s of computer programming, and when used in infinite combinations, can create as much variation as any code. Learning to knit, then, is a self-obvious stepping-stone to learning to code. Knit2Code serves as a simulator for coding. By thinking differently about coding and creating simulators for coding, we remove the biggest barrier the majority of poor communities have to learning how to code. THE COMPUTER. See Lindiwe's TEDx Talk from TedxBeaconstreet in Boston, Massachusetts here